Quick Tip – Handy ovftool 4.0 advanced options

I recently had a need to deploy an OVA using ovftool on a Windows desktop and I ran into the following error:

Error: Could not lookup host: root

Since the environment I was deploying to did not have DNS, the failed hostname lookup was expected. This was pretty annoying with previous releases of ovftool but it looks like with the latest 4.0 version, there is a new advanced option called --X:disableHostnameResolve that would allow you to disable this check. Using the new version of ovftool and the advanced option, I was able to bypass the check and deploy the OVA.

One really useful advanced option found in the latest version of ovftool 4.0 is --X:injectOvfEnv which I have already written about here, To get the complete list of ovftool advanced options, you just need to specify --help integration option. To download ovftool 4.0, you will need to either install the 2014 Tech Preview of VMware Workstation or Fusion.

Maximal size of a delta disk tree (use in conjunction with --makeDeltaDisks). Set to 0 to allow any delta tree size.

--X:monitor

Monitor the given first boot status file. Argument must be on the form: file://username:[email protected]/path/to/statusFie.json Supported only for the VI target and together with the --X:waitForIp option.

Would you expect the various retry options to apply when both source and target locators are ESX hosts (as you’ve described in another article). Just to see these working, I set to 100, but then verbose log seemed to indicate it still gave up on first connection loss (pulling the cable out for a few seconds).

Primary Sidebar

Search this website

Author

William Lam is a Staff Solutions Architect working in the VMware Cloud on AWS team within the Cloud Platform Business Unit (CPBU) at VMware. He focuses on Automation, Integration and Operation of the VMware Software Defined Datacenter (SDDC).